


Vantage Point

by patternofdefiance



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Drabble, M/M, exploration of time, perspective on time, relativity of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-23
Updated: 2013-05-23
Packaged: 2017-12-12 17:46:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/814263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patternofdefiance/pseuds/patternofdefiance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not that John can predict the future, but he can see ahead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vantage Point

**Author's Note:**

> musings on time and the inherent differences between prediction of events and a broadened scope for observation, coupled with, say, no sleep, produce this...

It’s not that John can predict the future, but he can see ahead.

He is sixteen, and he likes it that way.

 

He learns early on not to let on. He learns to smile and laugh, especially at himself, and he learns to make mistakes. It’s not like he can predict the future.

John flexes his fingers and signs. Medical school awaits.

 

The boredom was expected (expected) expected.

The army wants him. He fits a profile. He is in his prime. He has a skillset. John looks at the horizon and sees the red and the dark of a sinking sun. John signs again.

John is in his twenties, and this is all so _convenient_.

 

John takes high risk assignments. John comes back for more. John goes back for more. John stays for more.

John looks ahead and looks behind, and then ahead again. He can’t predict the future, but sometimes he can see the sun setting into blood.

John volunteers, and when the bullet hits him he hardly even flinches. It’s just a future.

 

John looks ahead at emptiness, but he recovers anyway.

 

Meeting Sherlock is a disaster. Catastrophe. Cataclysm to claim the world. John can see the approach of it.

John goes to meet the madman at 221 B Baker Street all the same.

(It’s not like he can predict the future.)

 

The kiss happens before it happens. John can see it all play out, words that are already written, and his eyes just jump and skitter, accidental, to the bottom of the page. John wets his lips, ready to lick his finger and turn the page, not sure if he should.

(John turns the page.)

(It’s only the future.)

 

The kiss happens, and John can feel the fall. It’s coming like night, like sunset. John lets himself fall all the same. (Sherlock doesn’t know.)

No one can predict the future, but sometimes John can’t help but see ahead.

 

John can feel the approach of cataclysm, and for once he rails against it, but he doesn’t leave. He doesn’t pull away, he doesn’t let it diminish. There is a sunset and a kiss and a fall inside of him, and behind.

John looks ahead and wishes he couldn’t. He doesn’t like it, and it stopped being convenient one (un)predicted touch of lips ago.

No one should be able to predict the future.

 

There’s so much that’s going to happen, and it does, and it has already, and John travels along the curvature of inevitability. He looks ahead and sees the cold black stone and the reflection. (Sherlock suspects.)

John doesn’t want to turn the page.

(But he does.)

 

The funeral happens, and all John can do is look back, look inside, and everything that was neatly labeled and ordered: the blood sun, the kiss, the fall – all of that is shattered by a new and certain gravity.

Instead, now, he has a blood kiss, a black fall, a stone sunset, permutations of despair.

John can’t predict the future, or he would have avoided this.

But John can see ahead, and he didn’t.

(It’s a signature, after flexing fingers.)

(It’s just his future.)

 

The sun sinks into stone, the kiss sets into red, and a crimson pool reflects a silhouette. Somewhere, back there, John is still falling.

(He is still falling.)

The page is waiting for trembling fingers to return.


End file.
